Monthly Archives: July 2009

EA is a monolithic corporation. They have more than enough HR people to screen out unqualified goons, like the geniuses who ran the spectacularly lame Dante’s Inferno “acts of lust” promotion at last week’s San Diego Comic-Con.

If there is one question you NEED to ask marketers before they take a job in your company, that question is “do you understand who buys our shit?” For marketing minions, that is the crucial dealbreaker, above all other criteria. These people are supposedly marketers, and yet they crafted a promotion that doesn’t work on any possible level. Allow me to break down this massive fail into smaller, more digestible (yet still totally incomprehensible) component fails:

The contest asked con folks to “commit acts of lust” with booth babes. This was presumably aimed at the kinds of people who would feel comfortable bothering the good people of boothcake for some kind of posed photo to win a contest. Right there, you have eliminated a ton of people who don’t have the heart to subject the boothcake to further annoyance; and you have mainly attracted the attention of the kinds of people who genuinely DO want to commit acts of lust with the boothcake. However, the contest also warns not to “get crazy” or do anything “depicting or mentioning sex, violence, drugs, alcohol and/or inappropriate language.” So… you get the attention of obnoxious perverts and then you tell us we can’t even mention sex? Just who is this contest targeting?

Ok, the contest is for people who want to win “dinner” (hey, that’s ME!)… and “a sinful night out with two hot girls” (wait… what the hell am I going to do with two hot girls?), and furthermore, “limo service, paparazzi and a chest full of booty” (paparazzi is something people WANT now? really?). Obviously, they think this game will only appeal to an elusive limo-and-hot-girl craving segment of the overall gamer population. Why not give out prizes that, oh, I dunno, a GAMER would want? Like cash, games, consoles, VIP tours of game studios and dinner with the lead design team? Don’t misunderstand: I love boothcake, but are these the kinds of people you really want to win a chaperoned, “just friends” dinner date with? What do you talk about? “Hey, I liked how you managed to smile through most of your shift and you didn’t freak out when that Sailor Moon guy hugged you for way too long.” Granted, I’m a hot girl, so maybe I’m undervaluing the joy of dinner with “two hot girls.”

So therein lies the biggest pile of fail: even though the entire contest concept and execution was completely misguidedly weak, they still had to add insult to injury by assuming the players are all straight, single men desperate for the slightest whiff of tits. Guess what? Not all gamer guys are hard up for opportunities to eat a free meal with a hot girl or two. Not all gamer guys even like-like hot girls. And, though it really truly hurts to have to say this again and again and again: not all gamers are guys. All these pitiful excuses for marketeers had to do was change the word “girls” in the contest promotional copy to “hotties” and then, depending who won, they could have had either the female or the male boothcake (er, “reps” as I guess some people call them) attend the prize dinner.*

The final ounce of fail was their halfass response to the uproar. When all the world is going to forget about this dumb promotion soon anyway, what harm is there in simply saying “Sorry, that was a lame contest!” and moving on with a better, more targeted promotion? Offer prizes that don’t insult your customers and create a contest built around a fun aspect of the brand/game. Don’t tweet ridiculous defensive clarifications, like you’ve just told an off-color joke at a party but think that explaining it in painful, obvious detail will somehow make it less offensive. Apologize, win people back, spin the flood of attention and free publicity back toward positive aspects of the product. These goons couldn’t handle the fallout from their PG-rated “edgy” contest idea, so ultimately I think the root of the fail was HR. Seriously, who hired these goons?

*Yeah, I live in a fantasy world where every game booth has both male and female boothcake on staff. It’s the same world where people get hired to do promotional work because they have some basic understanding of the desires and demographics of their target market. Go figure.

Why doesn’t Blizzard already have social media integrated? Why can’t you update your Facebook status while you’re waiting for a raid group to arrive? Why not play youtube videos in a little ornate metal-framed window above the skill buttons?

I’d volunteer it’s because we already have a client platform where you can play games and engage with social media (a web browser). But am I looking at this from the key perspective? No, because I’m not a social gamer. I’m an achiever/explorer type. I hardly need my in-game public chat channels much less a way to gab with people outside of the game.

When I’m playing a good game, I don’t want to multitask with real world bullshit. I’m in my magic circle. Let the calls go to voice mail, let the email go unread, and for the love of Will Wright, let the tweets STFU until I’ve logged out of the game world. A social media feed in my MMOs would be a very unwelcome intrusion, but that’s why it is so crucial for entertainment designers to design for the players rather than themselves.

TweetCraft highlights the fact that most online games still aren’t catering to the entertainment needs of social gamers. It’s not enough to be connected to friends in-world. For some, there needs to be omnipresent connectivity across online social services, across worlds.

Social media feeds in (and from) MMOGs are an interesting design consideration. I’m eager to see what the adoption rate is for TweetCraft and whether the underlying concept of external social media integration catches on in online games. It will be interesting to see whether Blizzard interprets this as a violation and bans the app or whether they start supporting social media integration in the core game client.

I stopped blogging a couple years ago, but kept my old blogging domain name. I recently set up a tumblr scrapblog on that domain, kellyrued.net. So today, in Google Analytics, I was surprised to see some traffic still trickling from an old Broken Toys post mocking me for having a sense of compassion regarding a 2006 Ansche Chung griefing incident in Second Life. A quick recap of the incident: a real life female entrepreneur was ambushed with several minutes of disruptive prim spam shaped somewhat like pink dicks during an in-SL live event with CNET reporter Greeterdan Godel (Daniel Terdiman). Griefing and poorly designed prim penises are nothing remarkable in SL. However, what struck me then about the story was how this female business woman and her family felt about the incident.

She and her family were not just offended or hurt by the disrespectful joke, they also felt violated because of the sexual theme of the attack (no matter how silly, a dick is a dick; her attackers could have used any 3D shape to pummel her event but they chose to use cocks). Ansche expressed strong emotions using controversial language, basically claiming the in-SL attack felt something like a rape. Since virtual rape is an impossibility (anyone can exit a game or turn off their computer), I realized that sexual themed griefing is really the internet’s equivalent of sexual harassment and, yes, sexual violence. A lot of people took offense to the idea that Ansche felt raped. Please note that at no point did Ansche publicly say she was raped or that what happened to her in SL was the literal equivalent of an offline physical sexual assault. Her husband simply stated that she felt raped; in other words, that the incident made her feel violated in a sexual way. Sexual abuse is a spectrum that runs from the highly debatable, minor transgressions to the undeniable extremes of physical sexual assault; the only commonality between incidents of sexual abuse is that the victim felt violated in a sexualized context. People who think sexual harassment and violence are just physical acts might consider reading up on sexual abuse just to get a few more perspectives on the issue (or at least skimming their employer’s sexual harassment policy for some insight).

I empathized because I could not imagine a business woman NOT feeling sexually harassed if someone she didn’t know came into a live event where she was speaking and started throwing pink dildoes at her on stage (so many dildoes that the event had to be stopped and moved to a new location). Regardless of whether the joke was funny or not, it obviously had sexual themes. That some people are sensitive to sexual harassment shouldn’t surprise anyone. From bullying, bra-snapping boys in junior high through obnoxious ogling male coworkers who strain professional relationships by asking for (very unwanted) dates, almost every woman has had experiences that were in no way equivalent to the crime of rape, yet were more emotionally unnerving than they should be due to the unwanted sexual tone in the incident. Would sexual harassment policies even exist if people didn’t admit that when interactions include unwanted sexual themes, however subtle, they sometimes have a different and altogether more stressful effect on the victim? If a coworker compliments your neat handwriting at work, that alone is not likely to creep anyone out. If they compliment your perky tits, that can be really uncomfortable. It’s a fact of life that sexually themed language, media, interaction, and, yes, SL griefing will have different effects on people depending on the experiences and emotions of everyone involved. For Ansche, clearly the dick deluge left her feeling violated.

So, I wrote a blog post defending her FEELINGS. Three different ladies in the games industry wrote to me privately to tell me they appreciated my post. It was thoughtful in tone and did not trivialize the serious crime of rape, however several guys in the games industry (who are not known for their emotional IQs) criticized my post at the time and accused me of conflating rape with what happened to Ansche . None of the people who agreed with me that they felt bad for Ansche (because of how she felt) would say that publicly though because of the backlash from all the people who were rolling their eyes and feeling superior to Ansche because they could see the humor in her humiliation, the everyday griefing in what she experienced as sexual harassment while she was just trying to do her job (her SL business was actually supporting her in real life). People who knew me, understood why I thought the incident was worth remarking on publicly. Someone had to question the “griefers will be griefers” free pass that everyone was giving this incident. And I felt that someone who did understand Ansche’s emotional reaction should say so out loud rather than quietly thinking “hm, that would suck if it happened during my interview” like so many women did. I study sex in games, and my primary research focus for a little over a year in 2004 was researching emergent gameplay in online multiplayer games (including griefing, which is just another form of emergent play which for better or worse provides entertainment and retention for the griefers and their audience).

Sexual griefing is something I understand and have few problems within the context of a social, recreational game where the griefing target has plenty of choices (you can report people, you can block people, you can teleport away, you can log off, you can switch servers, you can switch games). But Ansche was at work. She couldn’t just leave her own speaking event. She didn’t have access to controls on the land where she was being interviewed and there wasn’t any feature she could use in-game to block the type of harassment during the event. The only power she had was to end her event, relocate it, or laugh it off and try to continue her event with the ridiculous griefing underway (this would have been my reaction, but that does NOT mean her reaction was any less valid).

Anyway, for anyone who comes across the Broken Toys post with the out-of-context quote pulled from my old 2006 blog: I was being compassionate and discussing an issue without mocking anyone else’s view point. I never said in-game griefing could be the equivalent of the crime of rape. I acknowledged that a victim of sexual themed griefing in a virtual world could feel violated the way Ansche did. Even today, I encourage people to think about the offline parallels (sexual harassment), especially when you consider that the woman was at work when this happened, not playing some frivolous recreational game that she could abandon for a round of Tetris once the dick storm started. Anyone who reads Broken Toys knows this guy knows a lot about games but you can’t view everything that happens in virtual worlds only through the “game designer” lens. Virtual worlds are conduits for real life, not just fun and games; there be ethical issues here too, not just dragons and gamer bullshit.

Hit a girl with dicks while she’s playing an online game, that’s griefing. Hit a business woman with dicks while she’s working an event in a virtual world… there are other words for that, perhaps depending on who you ask.

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This is my personal work blog where I muse on topics that I find relevant to my work. This is not a developer blog, public relations blog, or official blog of any kind for my company. My personal views expressed on this blog are my own and do not reflect the views of Black Love Interactive LLC or any of my collaborators, clients, customers, colleagues, friends, family, pets, or arch nemeses.